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ABSTRACT
This article explores the case of famous Filipino gay amateur pornographers on Twitter (now X) within the so-called ‘alter community’, a collective of anonymous Filipino Twitter/X users who produce and consume amateur pornography. Facing homophobia in their everyday lives, queer men seek intimacy, friendship, and self-expression in social media, even through extreme means such as producing pornography with which they are catapulted to fame. Using ethnographic and interview data gathered since 2019, this paper explores the motivations Filipino gay pornographers have for producing pornography and their experiences of dealing with fame and celebrity. It considers the experiences of celebrity among minorities whose issues never received adequate public attention. What does celebrity mean to sexual minorities where patriarchal and heteronormative structures are deeply entrenched? How do they manage their celebrity status within ‘networked sexual publics’ which competes against the gendered roles they assume outside the internet? While gay pornographers’ celebrity capital is contingent on the search for genuine acceptance and authentic self-expression, this article frames authenticity as faithfulness to hetero-patriarchal sexual scripts and pornoscripts. Authenticity emerges from the convergence of platform affordances, individual desires, and fan demands, and it gets complicated in the context of queer porn microcelebrities.
Acknowledgments
The data used in this article came from the author’s Ph.D. thesis during his doctoral studies. The author’s study and doctoral research were funded through the Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme by the Research Grants Council. The author also thanks the reviewers of this article who gave their invaluable time and suggestions to improve it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Ruepert Jiel Dionisio Cao
Ruepert Jiel Dionisio Cao is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at De La Salle University, Manila where he teaches video production and communication theory and research. Broadly, he researches how underrepresented identities use digital media in everyday life and how these media can facilitate, hinder, or complicate social integration. Currently, Cao is researching how queer Asian men use digital pornography in navigating hetero-patriarchal regimes while expressing their sexuality. Cao obtained his Ph.D. in Communication from Hong Kong Baptist University where he was a recipient of the Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme.